Population II Reach for a Frenzied State

Population II Reach for a Frenzied State With Maintenant Jamais

On their sophomore effort, the Montreal fusion trio create an intoxicating alloy of noise.

by Khagan Aslanov

Photos by Rose Cormier

Published on March 27, 2025

For Population II, seeking outsiders was never a choice to consider. The school-hood friends, who bonded over a mutual love for Blue Cheer, Terry Riley, Can, Hendrix and the experimental side of psychedelia, decided very early on to form their own band. Instead of filling out their ranks by recruiting a drummer and a singer, they waited patiently for four years for Pierre-Luc Gratton to step into both of those roles – in order to keep the project as their own. That closeness pays massive dividends for the Montreal trio, and their second album, Maintenant Jamais, sounds like a collective labour of love, both incendiary and loose, and somehow without a single strand out of place.

“We’ve been school-mates, partners and best friends since forever. After 15 years, you develop almost a cosmic telepathy when playing together,” says Tristan Lacombe, the band’s guitarist and poly keyboardist, whose job as a screen-printer allows him to supply the band with all of their merch.

“Everything came together from jamming and improvising. We would play and record for hours and hours, and then suddenly, here comes a song,” adds bassist and mono keyboardist Sébastien Provençal, who also works on a maple syrup farm.

What Population II brews here is all their own. The band combines a dizzying number of aspects into their sound – psych, prog, fusion, krautrock, shoegaze, musique concrète, jazz modalities, free improvisation and a viable pop heart all coalesce in these shuddering tunes that course on the nervy, caterwauling energy of garage punk. And yet, for the amount of ingredients at play, the studio versions of these songs sound impossibly tight. The amount of focused interplay that Pop II harvests out of those towering jams, condensing them into five-minute implosive tracks, is an achievement in its own right. That the music remains so complex and yet imminently listenable through it all is another thing altogether.

That said, the band clearly do not want to abandon the long-form treatments of their genre altogether, and, laughing, Lacombe admits to “cheating” by writing multi-act pieces that were split into separate tracks.

Live, of course, Pop II get to unfurl these songs with perfect degrees of controlled chaos, projecting another touchstone influence – legendary Japanese noise outfit, Les Rallizes Dénudés, whose immense sound and feral performances were always something to behold. Similarly, Pop II’s live act has been earning them well-deserved high praise. The band has been on the road with the OSEES, just wrapped their first European tour, and are about to head to SXSW for their third appearance at the hallowed festival. As their touring goes ahead, the songs of Maintenant Jamais have been rupturing into endless variations, another feather in the cap of any talented improv group. You can see Pop II live in a dozen different places, and it will sound like a different set every time.

The promo package for Maintenant Jamais lists tea leaf prophecies as a vague concept behind the album. However, Gratton, the band’s drummer, lyricist and conceptual lynchpin, clarifies that what they want to say has less to do with arcane augury and more about the patterns of behaviour that guide us as simple parts of existence.

“I wanted to write about humanity and the way we create as a protective force, as if predicting a specific future,” he says, switching between English and French to find the perfect words. “I wanted to express time as a person, an entity.”

It’s a consuming theme, adding to the depth and passion with which Maintenant Jamais whelms the senses. Whether sonically, lyrically, or in unison, the album is an intense listen. Come for the ruminative lyrics about the state of person-hood, stay for the acidic drones and pyrotechnic fretwork.